Digital Snake Oil Merchants Are Stealing From The Already Broken

Scroll through Instagram for a few minutes, and you’ll be swamped by a parade of sponsored posts promising extraordinary wealth through minimal effort: “PDF farming” generating €25,000 monthly, rebranded ebooks yielding “$4230 in a month,” or selling “thousands of books without writing them.” 

These aren’t fringe scams hiding in the shadowy corners of the Internet. 

They’re algorithmically amplified, professionally produced advertisements popping up in millions of feeds daily. 

Instagram and its advertising and recommendation engines are accomplices to predatory schemes targeting financially vulnerable users, promoting fraudulent business models centered around AI-generated content and low-value digital products.

Scammy digital marketers are nothing new. 

If you’ve been around the Internet for a hot minute, you’ll have encountered them before. 

But the timing of this new wave of scammers feels particularly gross. 

The cost of living has skyrocketed. 

Wealth concentration has reached disgusting levels. 

People are scared, broke, losing their jobs, and running into the specter of their unemployment and social welfare drying up. 

They’ve got families to feed, and they’re being told daily that AI will take their jobs. They’re desperate, making them prime targets in scams that use the most sophisticated advertising surveillance and manipulation tools known to man.

The first sponsored post I saw when I started going down this rabbit hole was from an account called “pdffarming,” displaying an analytics dashboard with €25,089.83 in “Total Ad Revenue,” interspersed with the obligatory stock images and videos of Lamborginis — a mainstay of digital scammers.

The advertiser promises this income “each day” through a vague and horrifying concept called “PDF Farming.” I’ve not signed up for the service, but it appears to be a platform (?) to help you build digital funnels to sell PDFs. Groundbreaking, I know. The dashboard seems legitimate — likely a real analytics interface — but the implication that anyone can replicate these results is deeply misleading.

My next “sponsored post” advocated using your lunch break to “open CANVA and rebrand a DFY (Done For You, apparently) eBook you can sell 3 times a day for $47.” The post confidently calculates this equals “$4230 in a month,” conveniently ignoring market saturation, advertising costs, and the reality that pre-made content rarely attracts consistent buyers.

The pitch I found most brazen was “realsophiehoward’s” sponsored claim: “How I Sell 1,000’s of Books Each Month Without Writing Them.” Standing in front of groaning bookshelves presenting intellectual legitimacy, she promises Amazon riches without creative effort. Essentially, counterfeiting.

The “getdesignrr” advertisement completed the ecosystem, offering “Wordgenie” to “write my 100-page eBook” in minutes through AI generation, followed by Amazon publication — fraud as a Service.

These advertisements deploy calculated psychological manipulation through their language choices. Phrases like “How I make this each day” and “I sell thousands of books” construct a false sense of ongoing, repeatable success. The first-person framing deliberately blurs the line between genuine experience and marketing fiction, making outlandish claims feel like personal testimony rather than advertising.

The copy is riddled with urgency tactics. For example, the lunch break ebook strategy frames wealth creation as taking just “30 min” of casual effort. This artificial time pressure preys on the fear of missing an “obvious” opportunity that others are supposedly exploiting.

The “Sponsored” label legitimizes these schemes. The professional aesthetics and paid placement give every appearance of financial validation — after all, if these people can afford Instagram ads, surely their methods work?

The goal for all of these grifters is to specifically target vulnerable people, appearing during times of financial stress, presenting themselves as lifelines rather than what they truly are: exploitative schemes designed to extract money from those who can least afford to lose it.

But there is nothing of value here.

Digital marketplaces are already flooded with millions of low-quality PDFs and ebooks — many generated through the exact methods these advertisements promote. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing hosts over 7 million ebooks, with thousands of new titles uploaded daily. The suggestion that a hastily rebranded product will generate consistent $47 sales is absurd. I know authors who have poured their hearts and souls into books published through professional houses, with marketing teams in their corner, who struggle to generate three sales a day for a physical copy of a book at half that price.

The economics of digital products will always trend toward devaluation. Without scarcity, prices race to the bottom. When we’ve essentially decreed that access to the Beatles’ entire back catalog on demand is worth only $10–20 a month, why would anyone shell out their hard-earned dollars for some scam-ridden PDF? The AI tools promoted to “make thousands” are available to everyone. It’s an arms race of increasingly generic content. AI-generated ebooks deliver formulaic, repetitive text that any consumer will instantly recognize as worthless. Sites like Designrr promise “stunning ebooks in minutes,” but all their customers will ever get are bland, template-driven products that can never command premium prices.

The business model suffers from a fatal mathematical flaw: if everyone followed the “pdffarming” or “Sophie Howard” method, who would be left to purchase these products? The system depends on a continuous influx of new buyers. It’s structurally no different from a pyramid scheme. And, of course, the real profit center isn’t selling ebooks — it’s selling the dream of selling ebooks to aspiring “entrepreneurs.”

The victims of these schemes put precious time — often hundreds of hours, despite the Done For You promises — into learning smoke and mirrors systems, creating fraudulent products (that they will be on the hook for selling), and attempting to market themselves in the howling noise of social media, believing in promised outcomes that will never, ever, ever materialize. They exhaust their savings and dig themselves into a credit card debt hole, paying for courses, tools, and advertising.

It’s the same old story we’ve all heard about MLM schemes’ opportunistic and predatory behavior. And just like MLMs, when “guaranteed” methods fail, victims blame themselves rather than recognizing that they’ve been had. The internalized failure creates a shame loop that prevents them from warning others, and the cycle continues unchecked.

These kinds of schemes have always deliberately targeted those in financial distress — people seeking side hustles to supplement inadequate income, stay-at-home parents — overwhelmingly mothers — needing flexible work, or individuals facing unemployment.

These scammers are genuinely terrible people.

They’re bottom-feeders.

No one would disagree with that statement.

But the blame isn’t solely on them.

Instagram and Meta are directly responsible for amplifying these schemes.

Their platforms not only display and profit from these advertisements — they actively recommend accounts like “pdffarming” and “realsophiehoward” to users who engage with entrepreneurial content.

While the FTC technically requires income claims to be truthful and substantiated, enforcement is sparse on social platforms. Claims like “€25,089.83” in daily revenue evade scrutiny through careful wording and international operations.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect multi-billion dollar platforms to verify income claims in advertisements before publication, to enforce guidelines prohibiting “easy money” narratives, and to deploy automated systems to detect and flag suspicious earning promises. If AGI is “just around the corner,” as they want us to believe, and we’re about to colonize Mars, can we not bend our technological capabilities to preventing basic scams?

But Meta has fuck-all interest in doing that. They’d rather twist and contort their advertising policies to effectively legitimize digital snake oil salesmen, providing them an algorithmically-powered megaphone to reach millions of hurting, struggling folks already on the economic ropes.

If you’re tempted by these ads, by these influencers, by the lifestyle they insist is within your grasp, I’m begging you to stop and think. If they had the money they claim, they wouldn’t need to sell coaching, courses, and PDFs to you.

There is nothing for you here.

The digital products you’ll create in their systems will be worthless and add to the noise and the nonsense of the Internet, helping nobody and harming everyone, most of all you.

There’s no path to Getting Rich Quick that doesn’t involve massive fraud. If you want to make money on the Internet without becoming an extractive piece of shit, the only way to do it is to create something of value that you value yourself and find an audience for it — without the bullshit digital marketing, without the overblown promises, and without the exploitation.

Even then, believe me — making money is still bloody hard.

Don’t fall for the Instascammers.

And for the love of God, don’t become one.